When I call sox from Ruby using exec within my application, the command prompt does not let me return to my application until the selected file has completed playing.
If I use IO.popen, once I launched it, I loose control of the process.
I attempted to run the process with pipe, but the results to a file and return control to Ruby using the following command:
play '01\ -\ Planet\ Telex.mp3' > results.txt 2>&1 &
Sox uses the "I'm now a background process" command to pause itself, so as soon as the command above command runs, playback halts.
Maybe the solution would be to spawn a different shell from Ruby and operate the process inside of that. Does anyone have any better ideas?
I'm not sure what you mean by "loose control of the process", because IO.popen should do exactly what you want: spawn a subprocess and give you access to the input/output.
Here is an example of using it to send input to sed and then read the result:
IO.popen(["sed", "-e", "s/^/foo/"], "r+") do |f|
f.puts "bar"
f.close_write
puts f.gets
end
# foobar
If you want separate output/error streams, you can use popen3.